d8tabyte: Because I'm lazy, and I'm not talking about combinations of stuff like a sandwich, I'm talking about single items. If I take the "Recipe" route, then it's several more clicks to journal my food each time, since my own recipes do not show up on the food search in the main screen for logging. It's less time to fiddle with option 3 than to make a custom recipe, because I forage on what's cheap and available quite often.
lcleaner2b: I don't think I'm helping my fellow loggers by populating the database with every variation of an Oreo that exists. The distinction between it and a Hydrox is basically irrelevant to me. I think being able to say "I ate 100 calories of 'Oreo'" is actually very useful.
Another use: a great deal of the entries in the database contain outdated values for calories (it's common for a manufacturer to shave a quarter ounce off a snack rather than raise the price). I can't edit the existing entry, but I can say how many calories I actually ate by looking at the package.

Quite often I'll find an approximate match to what I want to enter for my food journaling, and I'll have a reference for the amount of calories... say for instance I go to the dollar store and I find a Snerkers chocolate bar, 300 calories. It appears by all rights to be a knock-off of a Snickers bar (that has, say, 250 calories). Now I have three choices if it isn't in the FatSecret system...
Firstly, I could enter all of the data from the wrapper into FatSecret. It feels like a bit of a waste of time because there's a dozen values to enter all for a snack.
Secondly I could enter a Snickers bar and not think about it, even if the total calories are different. This isn't optimal logging, I've managed to take in a lot of extra calories from loose adherence to logging.
Lastly, which is what I usually do, is I enter a Snickers bar and I choose, say, 1.2 serving Snickers bar... then I check the calories and iterate adjusting upward or downward from there, until I hit the target number of calories as per the Snerkers wrapper. This is a fiddly process to get accurate, but usually takes less time than entering all of the data from the Snerkers wrapper. My fat/carbs/protein come out roughly where they should be, and the calories are properly represented.
If I was provided with the ability to say I ate "300 calories" as the amount consumed of Snickers bar, I'd be able to specify both what I ate and how much of it I ate in the most succinct way.
This will be especially handy for things like fast food where the only data points you have at the time is the number of calories and the type of food. If I go to a smaller local restaurant chain, order their version of a "Big Mac" and I see the calories (and nothing else) on the menu (which is common in California where calories are required when a chain gets to a certain size)... well, I could just tell FatSecret I had 700 calories of Big Mac and be done. How cool would that be?
All of the data is in the system, we already know the ratio of calories per unit measure, it would just be reversing the algebra to solve for quantity instead of solving for calories.

For my RDI I had to select "Sedentary" as my lifestyle for it to give me a reasonable recommendation. As far as my calorie intake versus output, for the balance to work out for the amount of weight loss or gain I had to not use "sitting" as an activity... instead I used "resting" and the math ended up reasonably close.

Try the Shangri-La diet. The basic gist of it is that you add a certain amount of flavorless calories to your diet, and your body's natural regulation of hunger is adjusted as a result. It's allowed me to take in a lot less calories than I would normally, without really noticing it, so as a result I need less "Will Power" to take in less food.

I can totally relate to rich foods being ur comfort. The only thing I have ever found (beyond a dulling of the desire with some diets) is ketosis. Now I have no problem even watching others eat stuff rite ...